::A Geek in Korea::

A couple was celebrating their anniversary, and asked us to come along on a train/bus tour of the southern region of Korea, specifically Jeollanamdo, an area I’ve never been to before due to it’s remote nature. We got in on the tour, and set off early Saturday for our adventure.

We went to an AMAZING Green Tea Farm. Bosung is the home to the most famous Korean green tea, and it happens to be my favorite strong green tea. My wife and I had been planning for YEARS to try to see this place, but due to it’s remote location and poor transportation access, couldn’t go before this trip. It was really pretty. Good enough that I’ll even forgive them for this:

Green tea ice cream soft serve.

The tour itinerary stated, “You’ll never forget the first time you taste green tea ice cream.” It’s not nasty, but it’s not really very good. Green tea really doesn’t need it’s own flavor of ice cream, but it exists, and I’ve now eaten it.

This was the best time to go to this region of Korea. The flowers and trees were in bloom, and it was CRAWLING with tourists. Everywhere we went there was an insane crush of people and it wasn’t easy getting around. Our bus was a modified mini academy school bus, so the seats were not designed for long haul travel. It was extremely uncomfortable to ride around it from location to location.

We ended the first night at Jiri Mountain, which was two hours out of our way, at least. There was a mediocre hot spring resort that had the standard “Hot Water, Cold Water, Hot Room, Hotter room” nude bathing only sort of set up. It was okay, but there are probably better resorts in Daejeon to try if I was really into the nude bathing thing.

After the sauna, we headed back to our hotel for dinner. We ate as a group. They served fish with a lot of different side dishes. There was a lot to eat, but our group tried to finish off everything we could. We actually ate more than the rest of the Korean groups on our tour, but not out of any effort to try to show people up. One of the people on the group thanked us for eating all the Korean food, as if this was a new experience. The two foreigners I was traveling with have also been here for a while, so we take new foods in stride without even considering it special anymore.

The room in the hotel was “Korean style”, which means no bed, only a series of thick matresses on a floor. Since there was no bed, our friends took a blanket out to a pagoda that was a block away near a parking lot. We had late evening picnic with wine and snacks. They slept out on the pagoda, while we returned to the hotel. The wake up call for the next day was 3 AM! We didn’t have long to sleep before we started out on the next leg of the trip.

Check out the pictures in the newly added Flickr group!